I'm working with bat files, and I need to use Java 1.7. Unfortunately the output of:

@echo off
java -version
pause

is that I'm using Java 1.6.0_27b. I completely removed Java, and the directories do not exist anymore in Program Files (x86) nor Program Files. Why is it that the jvm still exists, and why is it pulling version 1.6? How can I go about removing it?

Install the UnxUtils package from http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/. (Or Cygwin if you're feeling ambitious.) That will give you the which command, which you can use to determine exactly where that java is running from. Make sure you do which java.exe and not just which java.

C:\>which java.exe
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_51\bin\java.exe

That will let you figure out where it's installed, and from there you can probably infer which distribution it is and how to uninstall it. The output of java -version should tell you who produced it, too, along with that version number. (Though the version "1.6.0_27b" pretty much means it's Sun/Oracle's.) Once you find the installation, you may be able to run an uninstaller from there, or you may be stuck manually removing the files and PATH entries.